Knowledge that Transforms

The adoption of religious nationalism as a public project by the Saudi state continues to intimately shape the experiences of Saudi women, despite recent initiatives facilitating the participation of women in the workforce. Through interview-based evidence, the paper shows how patriarchal societal norms and practices rooted in a particular interpretation of Islam and enshrined in legislation are transported into the workplace and impact upon the daily lives of Saudi women auditors. Although various barriers to the progression of women auditors are already identified in the accounting and gender literature, our study provides additional insights into how the profession in Saudi Arabia takes a very distinctive gendered form due to the interaction of gender with religious and cultural norms. Additionally, our evidence highlights the role of the global audit firms, particularly the predominantly male audit managers and partners, in adapting their diversity management practices to navigate the constraints on female auditors in the Saudi context. We find evidence of pervasive inequality and the re-segregation of the Saudi female auditing workforce into ’woman-friendly’ areas, with potentially damaging effects on career progression.

Advocacy movements play an increasingly prominent role in shaping corporate social responsibility (CSR) management and reporting practices. Prior research mainly studies advocacy movements who form and operate on the periphery of the organizational field(s) they seek to alter. We know comparatively little about how these movements materialize within fields and use established field networks, resources and power structures to transform CSR and CSR reporting norms. This paper examines how an advocacy movement formed and evolved within the Dutch investment field to embed a suite of social and environmental accountability mechanisms therein. We examine the evolution of VBDO, a membership association which promotes and polices corporate accountability among Dutch listed companies and investment institutions. We depict how a movement of diverse actors materialized in and around VBDO to stimulate responsible investment and sophisticated CSR reporting in the investment field. Insights from social movement theory and institutional work are integrated with Stark’s (2009) concept of organizing dissonance to theorise the conditions underpinning the movement’s emergence and influence. We uncover how rankings work - the co-creation, dissemination and policing of CSR benchmarks - and (institutional) work censorship - the strategic self-censoring of institutional work - coalesced to cultivate constructive collaborations among movement actors. We show how this enabled the creation of accountability mechanisms that facilitated VBDO’s transition into an influential and unique boundary organization. Our analysis extends prior research by revealing the role of institutional work in cultivating cooperation between advocacy movements and the targets of their reforms. By illustrating how actors’ opposing value frames co-existed peacefully as VBDO’s accountability mechanisms evolved, we offer a counterpoint to studies suggesting that compromise underpins the organization of dissonance among actors constructing corporate accounts.

This discussion paper outlines the wider context from which the systems versus package debate has emerged, and draws on the papers included in this Special Issue to make suggestions for future progress. It argues that much research work has focused on narrow aspects of management control systems and has often detached these from their wider organizational contexts, diminishing its value. Researchers should recognize that management control systems are complex in themselves, and they interact in complex ways with the settings in which they are used. We describe various consequences of this situation and provide suggestions as to how research can be improved. We conclude that there is a need for more field-based studies by academics who are better connected with the world of practice. Only in this way will our research work both lead to better, more reliable, theories of MCS design and use and also be useful to practitioners.

This study examines the influence of cultural regions on the interdependence between delegation of authority and other management control (MC) practices. In particular, we assess whether one of the central contentions of agency theory, that incentive contracting and delegation are jointly determined, holds in different cultural regions. Drawing on prior literature, we hypothesise that the MC practices that operate as a complement to delegation vary depending on societal values and preferences, and that MC practices other than incentive contracting will complement delegation in firms in non-Anglo cultural regions. Using data collected from 584 strategic business units across three Western cultural regions (Anglo, Germanic, Nordic), our results show that the interdependence between delegation and incentive contracting is confined to Anglo firms. In the Nordic and Germanic regions, we find that strategic and action planning participation operate as a complement to delegation, while delegation is also complemented by manager selection in Nordic firms. Overall, our study demonstrates that cultural values and preferences significantly influence MC interdependence, and suggests that caution needs to be taken in making cross-cultural generalisations about the complementarity of MC practices.

Prompted by the weaknesses of standardized risk-management approaches in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, scholars, regulators, and practitioners alike emphasize the importance of creating a risk-aware culture in organizations. Recent insights highlight the special role of tone from the top as a crucial driver of risk awareness. In this study, we take a systems perspective on control system design to investigate the role of tone from the top in creating risk awareness. In particular, we argue that both the interactive and the diagnostic use of budgets and performance measures interact with tone from the top in managing risk awareness. Our results show that interactive control strengthens the effect of tone from the top on risk awareness, whereas tone from the top and diagnostic control are empirically not interrelated with regard to creating risk awareness. To shed light on the boundary conditions of the proposed interdependencies, we further investigate whether the predicted interdependencies are sensitive to the level of perceived environmental uncertainty. We find that the effect of tone from the top and interactive control becomes significantly stronger in a situation of high perceived environmental uncertainty. Most interestingly, tone from the top and diagnostic control are complements with regard to risk awareness in settings of low perceived environmental uncertainty and substitutes at high levels of perceived environmental uncertainty.

By applying critical dialogics to “surface the political”, we interrogate the microfinance industry’s disputed claims of promoting women’s empowerment in developing countries. We counterpose two competing ideological framings: the currently dominant neoliberal discourse of “microfinance minimalism” and a counter-hegemonic discourse articulated in gender and development studies. By examining the chains of signification and key signifiers in each discourse, we specify the political frontier that separates them. We then use these contested perspectives to analyze how a microfinance NGO in Bangladesh operates, which shows how they are dominated by neoliberal discourse that precludes more enabling alternatives. Drawing on our critical dialogic analysis, we consider possibilities for change and their implications for accounting and accountability systems. In so doing, we contribute to an emergent body of accounting literature drawing on critical dialogics to critique neoliberal ideas, values and practices and to propose alternative critical accounting and accountability systems consistent with a dialogic approach.

This paper discusses several conceptual and empirical issues related to understanding combinations of management control (MC) practices. First, the paper clarifies the meaning of the two main perspectives for investigating MC combinations – MC packages and MC systems. Second, the paper considers how researchers can improve theory development concerning the effects of MC combinations by explicating the causal mechanisms through which they arise. Third, the paper discusses whether loose coupling provides an informative perspective for understanding MC combinations, particularly in relation to how organizations adapt MC practices to contextual changes. Finally, the paper comments on the main empirical approaches for investigating MC combinations. Recent studies, especially those in this special issue, are drawn upon to illustrate how these issues relate to MC research.

Evidence for the relationship between management control practices and innovation is somewhat mixed, notably because of the insufficient attention devoted to the type of information management control practices provide. This study examines to what extent the interdependence of management control practices providing a mix of information for decision-making supports or impedes product innovation. We investigate whether the diversity of nonfinancial performance indicators and the functionality of cost information specifically and jointly contribute to product innovation. We also investigate whether environmental unpredictability moderates those effects. Survey data collected from a large sample of manufacturing firms show the specific effect of these management control practices on product innovation. More importantly, the functionality of cost information and diversity of nonfinancial performance measures are complements (substitutes) under high (low) levels of environmental unpredictability, and thus contribute to (impede) product innovation.